Yeah, absolutely. I'm not in the visual effects trade anymore, but its really hard to overstate how many technical aspects and processes it takes to get through this stuff. Automation like this doesn't eliminate artists; it frees them up to focus on the actual art aspect of it all so they can start texturing their character without having to spend hours unwrapping its uvw maps, or start animating it without manually weighting vertices to specific bones gratuitously.
The end goal of all this isn't to get rid of the artist but to give a team of 10 (or maybe even 1) artists the tools they need to produce what it used to take a team of hundreds. In that sense it does eliminate jobs...but frankly that's a tale as old as time and a big part of why we're all communists!
Yeah, absolutely. I'm not in the visual effects trade anymore, but its really hard to overstate how many technical aspects and processes it takes to get through this stuff. Automation like this doesn't eliminate artists; it frees them up to focus on the actual art aspect of it all so they can start texturing their character without having to spend hours unwrapping its uvw maps, or start animating it without manually weighting vertices to specific bones gratuitously.
The end goal of all this isn't to get rid of the artist but to give a team of 10 (or maybe even 1) artists the tools they need to produce what it used to take a team of hundreds. In that sense it does eliminate jobs...but frankly that's a tale as old as time and a big part of why we're all communists!